Friday, September 14, 2018

Few days ago I've got interesting APEX question (I don't mind that the question was sent by mail, but there's Oracle Community Forum where you can get quicker answer and more people will benefit from it).

..and the question is: how to define default values for fields that are shown when you want to download Interactive Grid report and send it by the e-mail.

Maybe I'm wrong but I think there's no native way to do this so I found a workaround.

You can do this for a specific region/page or globally by using global page (page 0).

First of all you need to create on click dynamic action triggered on checkbox item "Send as Email":

The Event Scope attribute must be set to Dynamic and if you want to restrict this dynamic action to the specific region you should define Static Container (jQuery Selector) property with static ID of IG region (for example #emp, if static ID of a region is emp).

You also need to create true dynamic action of a type Execute JavaScript Code where you can define items and values that you want to set:

Friday, August 17, 2018

Recently one of our clients upgraded APEX from 5.1 to 18.1 and all Interactive Grid regions/pages were instantly "broken". There was some strange JS error ("...to few arguments") in the console window.

After some investigation I found out the cause of the error. It's actually reported as a known issue (28202781 - INTERACTIVE GRID IN TRANSLATED APP GIVES ERROR ON UPGRADE). Apparently the text string APEX.IG.SUMMARY was changed in APEX 18.1 to have fewer parameters and if you have translated application it will raise a JS error at runtime. I don't know why APEX raises error in this case and I hope that this will be fixed in some next release, but for now here's the way how you can fix this.

Of course, you can go to APEX builder > Shared Components > Text Messages and translate it there with the new text message that will have exactly two parameters (if you have less than two you'll again get JS error). Original text is Interactive Grid. Report: %0, View: %1.
You can also do it with PL/SQL script:

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

There's probably no application that doesn't need some kind of configuration table for storing different data across different environments (development/test/production) - like URL to the report server, configuration parameters and stuff like that.

Before APEX 18.1 in most cases I would create some simple key-value configuration table, set procedure and get function...repeating same task over and over again.

From APEX 18.1 you don't have to do that anymore. There's new feature called Application Settings.

There are two ways to manage Application Settings. One is from the Application Builder (Shared Components):

You can define several properties there, but the one I like the most is On Upgrade Keep Value. If set to Yes it will keep the setting value upon application upgrade. That means that you can export your application from the development environment and import it to the other environments without any worries that parameter values will be overridden.

There's also API to control those parameters from PL/SQL. There's new package apex_app_setting with set_value procedure and get_value function. For more info see documentation.

Friday, June 8, 2018

As a follow up to my previous blog post about APEX sessions, there's one more thing that you can do now (in APEX 18.1) by using apex_session package - generate checksum for URLs created outside APEX session - for example in some email notifications created in a DB job.

First of all you need to enable Deep Linking (go to the Application Properties > Security > Session Management and set Deep Linking to Enabled). You can learn more about deep linking in the documentation.

Also, you have to enable Session State Protection for the item that you want to set in URL (in my case P2_DEPTNO):

Before generating URL you have to create session:

begin
apex_session.create_session(105,1,'MGORICKI');
end;
/

As I said in my previous blog post, to use any of the procedures from the apex_session package you have to run them as application parsing schema, one of schemas assigned to the workspace or one of the users with APEX_ADMINISTRATOR_ROLE role.

After that you should be able to create URL with the checksum by calling apex_page.get_url function:

Those procedures made debugging of the APEX sessions even easier. The same was possible before by using OraOpenSource's OOS_UTIL_APEX package, but it's somehow nicer when you can use native functionality.

With this procedures you can create or join existing session from your favorite IDE and use/debug all those session dependent features like:

collections

item session state

apex_mail

...

To use any of the procedures you have to run them as application parsing schema, one of schemas assigned to the workspace or one of the users with APEX_ADMINISTRATOR_ROLE role.

After that you can get/set item session state, query/create/modify collection and a lot more...

Set/Get Item Session State

Lets say you have v function call inside of a view or a procedure (I don't encourage you to do that, it's better to use bind variables or input parameters). Now, you can easily debug it from IDE by setting item session state:

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

One of the best functionalities of the Interactive Grid is declarative master-detail option. That's the reason why I like to use them also in readonly mode. Most of the time I don't need toolbar in detail regions so I turn it off (Region Attributes > Toolbar > Show = No).

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

I saw this at the presentation from Patrick Wolf (I believe somewhere in 2016.). You may already know this but today it took me some time to remember how it works.

There's an easy way to make your forms look nicer by using declarative option to display pre/post item property values as a part of an item (Display as Block). You can display icons, text or links there.

How To

To enable this, go to the Template Options of the item and set property Item Pre/Post Text to Display as Block:

After that, put the following HTML code in Pre/Post Text item property (in this case it displays Euro currency icon):